Coaching or Carriaging if you live in the U.K. or commonwealth

A fun part of railroads, or railways if you will, is that there tend to be two sets of terms for English speakers: a little similar to Micrsoft's concept of English (United States) versus the Queen's English. Carriages in the U.K. become coaches in the U.S.A, goods trains become freight trains, bogies become trucks, points become switches and so on. Not helped by Australia picking up a mix of both and I in particular model in both prototypes. Add to that the divergent approaches to railroading that result in things like buffers not existing in the U.S.A, vacuum versus air brakes, sizes of respective loading gauges and so on, many of the differences not helped by patriotism and/or parochialism.

Anyway, coaching then refers to the work on lighting the interiors of my N scale Overton coaches. The lighting kit comes with pickup springs that required the import purchase of the very fine Fox Valley wheelsets that do not have both wheels insulated as the smooth running Atlas ones (available at my Local Hobby Shop) do. The Fox Valley wheels have machined shoulders on the axles removing the need for any tricky re-guaging so it was a simple case of removing the insulated wheel and slipping on the pickup springs. The number of coils on the axle meant that it rubbed on both wheels, not delivering the promised smooth running. With some trimming the spring coils were reduced in number and smooth running returned.

The next challenge was to ensure that the bogies still rotated smoothly. Drilling out the middle of the pin to accommodate an electrical wire into the interior of the coach. Soldering joined the pickup spring to the wire of the Flicker Free electronics module which in turn are now soldered to the PCB holding the resistor and LEDs.

The next challenges to come are fitting out the interior with a floor, seats and people. Also transparent covering for the clerestory roof to impede the view of the PCB and its fixing mechanism (Scotch Double-Sided Foam Tape) which is bright white in a place where bright white should not be on the prototype. Not to forget that this is the first of three coaches to light in such a way but so far things have gone well enough in the design that I plan to do the same things next time. Lighting my work and maybe magnification may help, also soldering practice.

To capture the work required some playing with settings on my compact camera. As I read up on DSLRs, I have learnt some about aperture, ISO settings and shutter speed and was able to use some of that to get one really good shot that showed the detail around the bogie, axle and pickup springs.

In other news, work continues on the 1200 * 1200 replacement for the 1200 * 900 OO/HO up and over loop. 23 pairs of uprights, each 1/16" shorter than the previous have now been cut. Only 25 more to go...